SECOND LIEUTENANT DENYS EDWARD GREENHOW
ROYAL FLYING CORPS
6TH MARCH 1917 AGE 19
BURIED: LIJSSENTHOEK MILITARY CEMETERY, BELGIUM
The poem from which this inscription comes was once extremely popular and the sentiment it expresses once caught the spirit of the age. It has now gone completely out of fashion and today the poem is much more likely to be derided than admired. The inscription is a slight modification of the opening line of Rupert Brooke's sonnet, 'Peace', one of the poems in his sensationally popular '1914 and Other Poems', which included 'The Soldier', with its immortal lines:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever, England.
The opening lines of 'Peace' read:
Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
Greenhow's mother (his father had died in 1913) says 'match'd him' rather than 'matched us', but this scarcely affects the sense. God is to be thanked for having sent the youth of the day, or more particularly Denys Greenhow, the opportunity to match his skills and abilities with a great cause, the chance to rise above a world grown 'old and cold and weary,' and the opportunity to demonstrate the nobility of which he was capable.
For all that it is derided today as ridiculous and naive - how on earth could anyone have thought that going to war was in any way like a swimmer 'into cleanness leaping' (line 4) - the poem did express what many people thought. And not just early in 1915 when it was first published and the war was in its infancy, it still resonated with people in 1919 when the war was over and the next-of-kin were being asked to chose their inscriptions despite all that had happened.
Denys Greenhow was an observer in the Royal Flying Corps. He left school, Lancing College, in December 1915, was commissioned into the RFC in July 1916 and promoted Flying Officer in January 1917. On 6 March 1917, he and his pilot were returning to base with engine trouble when they were attacked by five enemy planes. Greenhow was shot and fatally injured, dying soon after the pilot managed to bring the plane down. Many good things were said about men in the letters of condolence their senior officers wrote to their families; Greenhow's Flight Commander wrote this in his diary, which gives it an extra impact:
In Greenhow we have lost one of our best and cleverest observers, one of the cleverest I have ever known.